David Lean directed motion pictures with an acknowledged consciousness of his actions and a stated set of intentions and expectations about the end product of his labour. As a worker in an industry where that end product faces evaluation based on economic results on the one hand and aesthetic satisfaction on the other, Lean achieved a stature which few other directors in the brief history of motion pictures have equalled. His autocratic technique was legendary; and yet Lean’s early career relied entirely on collaboration, first as editor on a score of pictures for other directors, then in a close association with the formidable Noel Coward on his first four pictures. For most of his career, Lean fiercely guarded the details of his personal life, which began with an upbringing and education in a Quaker tradition so strict that Lean was not allowed to see movies or attend the theatre until adulthood. Born in those first furtive moments in a silent movie theatre, Lean’s sense of artistry, which he seldom consented to discuss, was ultimately given free rein, as economic success permitted him a freedom of aesthetic choices very few directors have ever had.

It is difficult to imagine even a superficial analysis of Lean’s films that does not reveal an intensely personal filmmaker. The images and archetypes through which Lean’s motion pictures transfuse the narrative and communicate sensation or point-of-view are hardly unique. Contrary to the consensus of most film critics, Lean’s body of work, his oeuvre, presents as consistent a style and world-view as any auteur. It would be possible to compare Lean to other filmmakers, to weigh his early black-and-white pictorialism against that of Rex Ingram (whom he greatly admired), to contrast his “romantic” landscapes with Hitchcock, his construction of epics with Anthony Mann, his economy of expression with Renoir, and his fight to make pictures according to his vision with maverick filmmakers everywhere. Still, it is no easy task to place Lean in any directorial hierarchy, nor is it necessarily advisable to do so. Claude Chabrol remarked that he and Lean were the only directors working who would wait “forever” for a perfect sunset but that he measured “forever” in terms of days and Lean did so in months. In its overstatement, the comment revealed the respect which Lean’s peers had for his prodigious abilities. And yet when Lean spoke about himself, he was usually self-effacing. Often he would mention that fear of indecision while shooting that compelled him to take so much time and belabour such fine points in his preparations. Lean wrote about disguising technique in 1947; but it took more than fifty years of work for him to consider that he might be “a bit of an artist.”

Ultimately, neither Lean’s fame as a filmmaker nor any quirks of personality can displace or distort his real legacy: the sixteen motion pictures which bear the credit “Directed by David Lean.” In the first ten years of his directing career, from 1942 to 1952, Lean completed nine features. In the almost forty years that followed, he would make only seven more. Part of the reason for this is the change within the film industry. As budgets and shooting schedules grew, it become very difficult for any director to complete more than one feature per year. But even while other directors in the 1940s and ’50s were making several films every twelve months, Lean never made more than one (4). As the time he spent preparing projects grew from months to years, the time he spent shooting grew from weeks to months. Very few directors have experienced a fourteen-year gap between pictures as Lean did with Ryan’s Daughter (1970) and A Passage to India (1984). Lean spent six years preparing what was to be his final film, an adaptation of Conrad’s Nostromo, only to succumb to cancer a few weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin. Lean’s “legendary” status had already been forged in a span of just eight years from The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) to Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to Doctor Zhivago (1965), three pictures which generated very substantial box office receipts worldwide, won a combined 21 Academy Awards but could not secure Lean a critical reputation as a great director. Hence Lean’s renown since 1957 has been as a somewhat impersonal maker of films on a monumental scale.

The almost all-male casts of Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, the very title of the latter as well as Doctor Zhivago, may also have typed Lean for having heroes rather than heroines. In actuality, the principal characters of Lean’s last two films were women; and, in all, no less than seven of his sixteen films – Brief Encounter (1945), The Passionate Friends (1949), Madeleine (1950), Hobson’s Choice (1954), Summer Madness (1955), Ryan’s Daughter and A Passage to India – centered on female protagonists. Lean’s thematic preoccupations or “world-view” are delineated through his characters both male and female. The resemblance of those figures in different pictures, whether separated by four or forty years, is often remarkable. Even the names may be subtly similar as in Laura Jessen, Mary Justin, Maggie Hobson, Jane Hudson. Men and women, Lean’s signature characters are ordinary dreamers and epic visionaries, people who want to transform the world according to their expectations. When others die for his dream and his daughter turns against him in The Sound Barrier (1952), Ridgefield (Ralph Richardson) is forced to defend himself: “Can a vision be evil, Sue? It’s a terrible thing to make a man doubt everything he’s ever lived for.” Eighteen years later the local priest cautions Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles) not to dream for what you cannot have. “You can’t help having them,” Father Collins (Trevor Howard) warns. “Child what are you expecting? Wings, is it.” Like Madeleine Smith, Maggie Hobson, and Jane Hudson before her, Rosy Ryan does want to fly from the mundane world, wants to transform her surroundings to match her yearnings. In that sense, her visions a no less compelling than those of such larger-than-life Lean figures as Ridgefield or T.E. Lawrence or Zhivago.

The tragic flaw in Lean’s characters is a self-centeredness which can lead to misimpression, which can prevent them from seeing what is so clear to everyone else. However inculcated he may be on the concepts of discipline and harmony, neither his compatriots nor his enemies can really understand the motives of Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) as he builds the titled object in The Bridge on the River Kwai. In another era on the other side of the world, Rosy Ryan’s romantic yearnings are more simply summarised by her future husband. “You’ve mistaken a penny mirror for the sun,” Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum) admonishes, “I only taught you about Byron, Beethoven and Captain Blood. I’m not one of those fellows myself.” Rosy romanticises her schoolteacher. Nicholson like Ridgefield romanticises the task at hand. Lawrence romanticises the desert. The emotional peril for all these characters is exactly the same. Not even the most pragmatic of Lean’s protagonists, such as the indomitable Maggie Hobson or the career woman Jane Hudson, are immune. The themes which Lean does address repeatedly, from “ordinary” adulterous love to epic, obsessive madness, are not unique to him. Lean has said, without any sense of contradiction, “I’m first and foremost interested in the story, the characters,” but “I think people remember pictures not dialogue. That’s why I like pictures” (5). What is unique to Lean is his visual style, one that elucidates story and characters through pictures.

In his general theory, André Bazin divided filmic reality into three conceivable forms: “[1] A purely logical and descriptive analysis. [2] A psychological analysis, from within the film, namely one that fits the point of view of one of the protagonists in a given situation. [3] A psychological analysis from the point of view of the spectator” (6). To simplify these types, one might call them objective, subjective, or ironic respectively. As a director Lean dealt with all these “realities,” often within a given film, moved freely in a way few others have between these conventional modes and defined his vision through them.

Oliver Twist (1948) is a prime illustration. In the shots of the workhouse, Lean delineates a basic “reality.” His direction here is objective, although there are ironies in the very design of the set and the superimposed title, and aimed at establishing the narrative core of the film. The carvings proclaiming “God is Love” which loom over the heads of the downtrodden scrubwomen visually render the indictment of Victorian hypocrisy in Dickens’ novel [Frame 1]. In setting distance or angle, however, Lean may add to the material reality of image, something of the emotional or character reality, not “physically” present. As in the high angle medium shot of the boys drawing straws: when they leave, amidst hushed cries, Oliver is alone – his sensation is visualised by the isolation of his white-gowned figure within the grey confines of the frame and the two-dimensional reduction in height, the “flattening” imposed by placing the camera above him. Alternatively, by focusing on an image within the general expository necessity of the scene, Lean may underscore its dramatic, i.e. serious or comic, quality.

The only necessary images in the sequence of Nancy’s murder, for example, are those which make it clear that Sikes has killed her. Beyond that Lean may single out, still within the context of observable detail, a specific image such as the close shot of the infuriated Sikes or of his dog scratching furiously at the door. Lean’s selection of detail and emphasis was striking for 1948 in that it repeatedly tested the limits of the basic suspension of disbelief. Murder and the fixtures of a room are potentially equal as observable realities, if different on a dramatic level, just as they are beyond the confines of the movie house. In the example above, the obvious point, that the episode is terrifying because the dog wants desperately to get out, is made by a selective rather than substantive manipulation within the fixed reality of the scene. The make-up, facial expressions, and wider angle lens associated with Robert Newton’s portrayal of Sikes committing the murder emphasise the bestial aspect of the character [Frame 2]. The cutaway to the dog creates a simile for a human sense of terror and extends the metaphor of animalistic behaviour [Frame 3].

In spying through a glass port on Monks and Fagin in the back of a tavern, Nancy takes in everything she can but her view of the complete “picture” is restricted. Analogously, the “objective plane,” or that which provides the basic information in a film, is not aligned to any predetermined standards, neither induced from the general objectivity of the whole of cinema nor reasoned out a priori, but derived from the specific “vantage” set up by the director. And the definition of that objective plane, for want of a better term, the mise en scène, may be taken as the first component of directional style. That style is further refined in a substantive manner, by what Bazin calls “fit[ting on] the point of view of one of the protagonists.” Instances of direct “point of view” from Oliver Twist are strikingly recorded when the camera “becomes” Oliver fleeing a crowd of pursuers: travelling forward rapidly, it slips, at his eye level, through the arms of one man then runs into the clenched fist of another, whereupon it “loses consciousness” by means of a cut to black. Later, in the courtroom, it will sway dizzily, an effect accentuated by using a wide-angle rather than a normal lens, then blur in and out of focus, and finally fall over in a faint. Here an objective view of the world is physically displaced. Going back for a moment, consider again the shot of Oliver alone after drawing the short straw. Was it truly objective, or did the staging take it beyond a simple witnessing of a narrative event? Were the lighting and angle not, in fact, externalisations of the emotions of fear and isolation which Lean’s character felt?

The clearest example of Lean’s multiform visual usage may be found in the opening sequence of the film. On a country road in the midst of a sudden storm, Oliver’s mother begins to give birth to him. In one travelling movement in, Lean simultaneously records the labour objectively – a medium shot to medium close shot, her body arched, head tilted back, grimacing – and externalises both the intangible emotion of her plight and the physical sensation as well. Knifing pain is equated with a white sheet of lightning [Frame 4]. A contorting spasm is captured by an angular tilt from horizontal which levels off as the contraction of labour subsides. Her complete disorientation and the distortion of her real perceptions are characterised by making her walk on a treadmill before a process screen. This device makes her move unnaturally at the edge of consciousness and introduces a secondary “reality” of reduced dimension behind the already existing one of the film itself. Finally inserts of jagged tree limbs and twisted, thorny branches provide a visual metaphor for the acute discomfort which the character experiences [Frames 5 and 6].

Beyond this intricate subjectification, Lean may compound the frame’s reality with dramatic irony. This is exemplified in the sequence where Nancy is followed by the Artful Dodger. Through several shots, the audience has been permitted to observe the Dodger lurking outside the house and trailing behind Nancy down the rainy streets, a fact of vital concern of which she is unaware. An example of a subtler ironic mode on a figurative level is the first conversation between Monks and Fagin in the garret. Here, while Fagin’s eyes stay on his body moving in and out of the shot, from the audience’s vantage Monks momentarily becomes a thin, black shadow on the right side of the frame [Frame 7]. This stylised rendering of Monks’ form implies his malevolent character as well as the manner in which his presence looms ominously over the entire picture, a “fact” which Fagin (as the shadow is not in his line of sight) cannot know.

On a narrative level, Oliver Twist is a typical, third person film, that is the revelation of narrative “facts” is not identified with or restricted to the perceptions of a single character. Lean’s extensive tendency to subjectify a story-line is clear in the earlier Brief Encounter. This is not merely because most of the film is told in flashback, complete with extensive voiceover narration by the female protagonist, Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), but because as in Oliver Twist, Lean repeatedly uses visuals that underscore the subjectivity. Before Laura’s narration is even established, Lean sets it up with an exaggerated point-of-view shot: an extreme close up of a woman’s mouth after which Laura is heard thinking to herself, “I wish you’d stop talking.” By having the first thought spoken on the soundtrack one with which the audience is likely to empathise, the intrusiveness of the narration is buffered and the transition smoothed. When she arrives home, there is a more subtle effect: her husband’s hat is framed in the foreground as she climbs the stairs and he calls to her, simultaneously establishing visual and aural emblems of his presence before he is even seen. When he is seen, various aspects of his appearance, from his moustache to the pinstripes in his suit, immediately contrast with the look of the man she was with in the tea room. All these details reinforce or anticipate parts of what Laura’s flashback will reveal before it even begins.

Since most of Lean’s narratives are organised in a way which is neither “first” nor “third” person, shots or sequences like those already cited may suddenly shift the film into either mode without disrupting or overwhelming the basic structure. Subjectivity may be accomplished in several ways. The narrative itself may be literally bracketed by being presented as a flashback from either the central character (Brief Encounter, Passionate Friends), a subordinate one (Doctor Zhivago), or a combination (In Which We Serve and, implicitly, Lawrence of Arabia). In any narrative context, shots may be intercut to suggest the thoughts or sensations of a character, as in Oliver Twist and Brief Encounter, or characters, as in the sparking streetcar terminal when Zhivago and his still-unknown, future lover, Lara, brush against each other early in that film. Shots may become literally what the character sees; or shots of the character may be manipulated to focus on an interior state. Simple instances would be the hanging in Great Expectations (1946) or the Cossack charge in Doctor Zhivago, when there is no point-of-view shot of the terrible event but merely a slow move in to reveal the horror in the actors’ faces. A more intricate example is found at the beginning of Brief Encounter. When Laura returns home after the final parting with her lover, she sits in the parlour and realises that she cannot tell her husband of her affair, however platonic. A medium close shot of her slumped in the chair is cut with an over-the-shoulder view of her husband working a crossword. Lean shifts to a wide angle lens for this, suddenly extending perspective and making the man and the objects of the room in front of her seem farther away than they actually are, visually rendering her state of mind as she draws back from them into herself [Frames 8 and 9]. Lean extends this further by bringing down the key light and dissolving back to the tea room. By using an unreal, even theatrical, effect, Lean creates a hyper-real perspective, for as Laura’s silhouette remains in the foreground, she “watches” Alex Harvey enter the room, the tea room and her room also, and in her imagination substitutes him for her husband whom she literally “fades out” without even leaving her chair.

All this should suggest something of the awareness of the medium which Lean brought to his material. Lean’s working methods are well-documented elsewhere and seemed to vary little throughout his career. Of the script stage, one of his early writing collaborators, Ronald Neame, observed: “Every line of dialogue, not just dialogue, but every line of description is studied and worked out before it’s put down in that script” (7). His last collaborator was Robert Bolt: “We rewrite it about four times until we are satisfied. And, of course, it is David who must be satisfied with it” (8).

Despite the numerous awards and the frequent praise of reviewers for most of his projects, Lean has never been a critical favourite. Despite the fact that the descriptions of how Lean worked out the shooting script could easily be mistaken for remarks about the widely admired Alfred Hitchcock, this disfavour is particularly marked among auteurists. Andrew Sarris not only relegated him to “Less Than Meets The Eye” in the seminal AmericanCinema, but concluded his assessment with a pun about “too little literary fat and too much visual lean” (9). When Ian Cameron commissioned the first book on Lean more than thirty years ago for the pointedly auteurist Movie Paperback series, he did so because “on confronting many of the filmmakers I most admire, I invariably find that the film-makers they most admire are Messers. Lean and Fellini whose work I cannot abide” (10). While Fellini’s monomaniacal imposition of a world view on his pictures has never been in doubt, Lean’s still has seldom been perceived. In Sight and Sound magazine’s once-per-decade poll of the greatest films and directors in the history of cinema in 2002, David Lean and his films were entirely absent from the critics’ list. In fact, while Fellini and 8½ were included, Lean and his pictures were not even close to making the cut. The directors poll, of course, was another matter. There Lawrence of Arabia was in the top five and Lean tied for ninth (with Renoir and Scorsese) (11). The conundrum of Lean’s career continues, admired by his peers and by filmgoers but more likely to be accorded approbation than a mantle of greatness by critics.

David Lean Website
Sponsored by the David Lean Foundation, this site outlines Lean’s career and provides a catalogue of materials related to Lean’s career from the BFI collections. There’s also an extensive links and resource page.

Britmovie
Contains bio and filmography with production credits and images.

David LeanA David Lean resource site. (Some links on the websites page are dead).

Ian Cameron in a letter to Alain Silver, May 20, 1971. NOTE: the Movie Paperbacks series ceased publication in 1973 just after the manuscript was delivered and Leslie Frewin eventually published the first edition in 1974 concurrent with Gerald Pratley’s.

About The Author

Alain Silver is a Santa Monica-based writer/producer of independent feature films, whose books include genre surveys on the samurai film and the vampire film, director studies of Robert Aldrich and David Lean, and seven volumes on film noir.